From Wednesday 12 June on X – formerly Twitter – it is no longer possible to see user likes. Elon Musk introduced a default setting where i like the contents on the platform are hidden. We can see ours, that is, the tweets under which they have decided to press the heart. And the user who posted the content can see who posted it like, just as the count for social metrics will remain visible. But it will no longer be possible to go to another user’s profile and see their likes. «They became private to better protect the privacy of everyone,” wrote the official social media account. «It’s important that people can put like to things without being attacked for doing it”, commented the owner Musk. The feature was already introduced at the end of last year as an option for Premium users, but this week it became the standard for all subscribers. The CEO of SpaceX and Tesla had already spoken out in the past against the visibility of Likes, and with the very functionality of likewhich would be considered an unreliable metric of the social network. The Verge remember that at the end of 2023 Musk asked the engineers working on the platform to study a solution to completely remove the action buttons under the tweets, and give more importance to the impressionsviews of individual posts.
The reasons
The official one is the privacy. In this way each user will only know what their likes are and those under their posts, knowing that they will only be visible to themselves. “Soon you will be able to like without worrying about who might see it,” explained X’s technical director, Haofei Wang, a few weeks ago, suggesting that many people feel discouraged from showing appreciation for “edgy”, politically incorrect content. Recently, for example, a Labor Party candidate in the United Kingdom was excluded from the party’s lists for putting like to some content that criticized the violence of Israel’s action on the Gaza Strip. But some specialized sites question the official reasons. One of the strongest criticisms is that of Alex Kirshner on Slate. «This will allow people to approve the content of a post without having to personally defend their position», writes the journalist, who insists on the deresponsibility of users, especially those who hold public office or are well-known figures, «i like on Twitter they were never a great form of resistance, but their public visibility provided a bit of a barrier against antisocial behavior.” Kirshner then adds that this occurs at the height of Musk’s management, which allowed the proliferation of bots on the platform: with the concealment of the identity of those who placed the like, you will only see the number of reactions and it will not be possible to verify whether they are authentic profiles or not. «Musk has allowed Twitter to get horribly worse, and spam is one of the most glaring problems», he explains, «before he arrived users weren’t faced with automated bots on a daily basis trying to convince you to invest in cryptocurrencies or so much pornography”. A topic on which Musk has granted total openness. Since June it has been possible to publish explicit content, including pornographic videos in the name of the “autonomy of adults” to create the content they believe, provided that the videos or images disseminated are marked with a content warning dedicated.
